Un-rare books owned by very few people

Of the 1,100 books I've cataloged, 300 are in no other catalog in LT, and about 125 are in only one other catalog. I wonder if that's a typical ratio? We're not talking collector's items here, or expensive rareties, but books you could find for a few dollars now. Example: The Secret that Exploded, by Howard Morland. No one else has posted this thoroughly un-rare book. Abebooks has fifteen copies for sale, starting at $7. I wonder what the percentage of such singletons in a typical LT-er's library is?

Of my ~1,300, 325 are in no other catalog, and ~75 in one other. So pretty similar to yours in ratio, give or take a bit. Bizarre, isn't it?

I'm listed as the only owner of one-eighth of my books (68 out of 544) as opposed to your 27%. The ratio for my books used to be even higher when LT had fewer users. Some of these singletons, I am sure, are just the way that books are entered (e.g., the Bible, Great Books of the Western World, etc.), but many of them just aren't anywhere else.

I, too, am astounded at some of the books that SHOULD be owned by everyone in the whole world (I mean doesn't everyone have a copy of Dune boy or the Tom Lehrer Songbook or Lloyd Kahn's Dome Book's (hmm ... the Dome Books don't even come up as touchstones here) or my old hippie Hot Tubs book.

Douglas

"In the end, only kindness matters."

If I went by the number of books that my catalogue says I don't share, it would be 32.5% (946/2940). But that's clearly wrong.

For example, my catalogue says no one shares Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, but if you search on that title, you'll find three other copies, just different editions. And that seems to be true of a great many of my so-called singletons.

My experience has been exactly like lilithcat's-so much so, that at one point I sorted my catalogue by least shared and checked the author records for each individually. I was amazed by how many matches, even exact same edition matches, I found for my singletons by doing this.

While I think LibraryThing now ignores articles like "the" at the beginning of titles and will match new additions based on the words following the article, previous versions of the code did not, and just in the last few days I've combined dozens of books that had been separated due solely to a missing article. Capitalization also seems to be a problem: American style titles (most words capitalized) will often not be matched with European style titles (only the first word capitalized) even when the ISBN and MARC data is the same. Add to that the oddities of manual entry (I've seen question marks, birth and death dates and all kinds of abbreviations inserted into authors' names), the inability to combine works without an author coupled with no field for editor, plus the cataloguing schemes of multiple international institutions and inevitably you end up with a lot of falsely orphaned books and authors.

The first thing I now do after I enter a new book into my catalogue is to check the author page to see if there are editions or works it should be matched with but is not. Just yesterday, three books that came up as orphans when first entered were found to have at least one exact match on checking.

I'm at 55% unowned by others in LT. Some of them are low print runs (not rare in the sense of value) and of a highly specialized topic (prehistoric art studies for example). Some I know are present on LT, but I can't exactly figure out why they don't match up. In one case, when I list the author of the book (as I do), there are no matches. If I let Amazon create the author, it lists the author of an appendix first. I wanted to capture the "true" author, so my book doesn't match. Roman Imperial Coins are another example. If I default to LT matches, the bibliographic entries are not accurate and reduce the 10 volumes in the series to "one" entry. The volumes have different authors in some cases and were published over a period of about 70 years. Volumes in one series, but different books. There are multiple copies on LT, but different entry styles depending on manual entry or automatic source used to enter the volume. These examples would reduce the unique books slightly, but I'm probably still hovering around 50% one of a kind that I know are not really rare books or "unique."

I see about 250 out of 1500 owned by just me and about 200 owned by me and one other, but much of it does seem to be unusual editions rather than books - likely a disease particularly of those of us who like rare books, that when we buy a common book, we still find an edition that's not quite so common. I also think there are some areas where common has a whole different meaning - photography and art books, poetry, and a number of other areas where a book with wide circulation still prints in editions that are a small fraction of the size of a run for a popular novel.

I have a lower number of books than everyone else, but I'm running at about 10% unmatched. (I have only entered about half my collection so far, but most of my rarities, so I suspect that percentage will drop)

As a counterexample to what was mentioned above...sometimes editions do matter, and I wouldn't want someone who has one edition to be listed as having the same book as my edition.

As a simple example:
1) My Signet Classics edition of Les Miserables. The only unabridged paperback in-print.
2) The Movie-Tie-In version which has about 70% of the novel abridged.

Both are in-print, and un-rare, so we're not talking about the 1887 translation I own.

However, lets do. It could be considered a very un-rare edition. Anyone who wants to, can download that translation at Project Gutenberg. I haven't yet included any digital books in my library, but I am sure some have.

I don't know how I would feel if someone who had downloaded it, claimed to have the same edition as my physical book. Every word might match. But...

I'm up to 1296 books with 339 singletons, so my rate has dropped to 26%. But I've only done a few of our Chinese and Japanese books, which will send that rate soaring.
LT distinguishes the edition of a work from the work itself. Eg I have oddball editions of Chesterfield's letters and Two years before the mast. It was some work to find the publishing information for them, and LT made them singletons when I had entered it. But I merged the edition with the work in both cases, so the "shared" field in their entries in my catalog shows how many people have some edition or other of these works, while if you look for that particular edition you will find only the entry in my catalog.
Gavroche, here's a problem for you: what about a pirated printing? Doesn't seem to me that it should count as the same edition it was pirated from, but how to distinguish? (I agree that downloads from Gutenberg need some special treatment.)

How about cases where the professional librarians ascribe a work to a certain author but common sense and common justice give the credit to another? Eg Angus Graham's translation of Chuang-tzu, in which there are passages that may have been written by someone called "Chuang-tzu" but many others written by different folks, and the whole work has been painstakingly reconstructed by Graham through years of textual criticism and historical research. LOC catalogs it as "translated by" Graham. Compare another Chinese book from roughly the same era, the Chu Ci or "Lyrics of Chu". The 1959 Oxford Press version by David Hawkes ought, in my opinion, to be credited to his authorship for the same reason I think Graham's Chuang-tzu ought to be credited to the authorship of Graham: because the original text is a spatchcock of the work of a number of authors and the translator put years of his own work into the textual criticism that distinguishes his edition. Well, look what a search got me:

* The Songs of the South: An Anthology of Ancient Chinese Poems by Qu Yuan and Other Poets (Penguin Classics) by Yuan Qu
* The songs of the south : an ancient Chinese anthology of poems by Qu Yuan and other poets
* Ch'u tz'u: the songs of the South an ancient Chinese anthology by David Hawkes
* Ch'u tz'u: the songs of the South, an ancient Chinese anthology, by David Hawkes by Xiang Liu 77?-6? B.C. supposed comp
* Chu tzu: the songs of the South an ancient Chinese anthology by Xiang Liu
* Chu tzu: the songs of the South an ancient Chinese anthology by David Hawkes

The above are all editions of the same work, but because professional librarians ascribe them to various authors, I have no way to combine them into one work.

Suggestions?

Anyone who wants to, can download that translation at Project Gutenberg. I haven't yet included any digital books in my library, but I am sure some have.

Someone actually added all? a good chunk? of Project Gutenberg to his catalogue. Tim was not amused.

Tim was not amused.

LOL..........I bet not !!!!

Recently I purchased 30 digital books online through a website that actually allows me to sign on and read the books online wherever I am, but I have digital copies on my own computer, and a CD backup.

When I add them, should I add them as the same as their physical counterparts, or create separate entries? I'm leaning towards the former, and I'll just tag them as digital. I think it's what Tim would prefer.

(Kind of like I've already tagged an 'Advanced Reading Copy' and an 'Uncorrected Proof' I own of two novels. They are certainly different editions from the finished product, but I wasn't going to create a new entry when there is a tiny number of copies in existence.)

And that's probably what should be done with Project Gutenberg, and similar, editions. Unless a special 'digital' field is created.

On the other hand, if the person had read those books on PG, or printed them from PG, they should be there. I suspect that very few people have actually read all 18,000 books on PG, but I would consider those actually read, or started, or printed out and stored at home to count for LT.

I've got 98 of 813 books shown as not shared with anyone, though at least three are really obviously wrong: There's a King James Bible, a Book of Common Prayer, and a Latin Bible there. (There are also a Latin Breviary and Missal, but those might be unique to me.)

Part of my problem is that I've modified the data in the listings for those books, to reflect what's actually there, as opposed to how Amazon lists them.

Up to 1600 now, where we must pause for a while (that's about a third or less of what we will catalog). 401 of those are singletons and 190 books are in only one other catalog. That brings those ratios down to 25% and 12%, but the last several hundred have been entered from ISBN lists, which means books with no ISBN have had to be set aside for later slower processing. Looking at what is left, a final count of something like 50% singletons does not appear improbable.

I have started with what I have read, not what I own, so I have quite a few singletons: 90/900 so far (=10%).

Here's a more or less final report. We stopped at 6800 books cataloged. Most of the remaining 500 or so are in Japanese or Chinese, quite laborious to catalog and so to be deferred indefinitely. Of those 6800, 1252, or 18.4% are singletons, and another 654 are in only one other library.

There are surprises here. We can understand that no one else would have Kitaîsko-russkiî slovar nauchnykh i tekhnicheskikh terminov, but are we really the only owners of Kenkyusha's New Japanese-English Dictionary?

Also, some of the singletons are false positives, e.g. Funny Cats which is a singleton in our catalog because none of its other three owners give author credit to Jean-Claude Suarès.

232 of my 669 books are not shared with others and 45 are shared with only one other person.

I find that a lot of my medical books such as Handbook of Death: Mechanisms, Causes and Certification, Handbook of Poisons, and A History of Medicine are not shared by others.

One book of mine that I though was unrare turns out to be rare indeed. The Wonders of the Sky
by W. J. Russell, an astronomy from 1898 doesn't even show up on abebooks, or google for that matter.

Fogies, did you notice that your touchstone doesn't actually point to the work you have catalogued? That's the problem; it's listed several times with different "authors", hence there's no way to combine. So you aren't the only owners of it, no.

grapeofdeath:

If you look under the author
Lois N. Magner, you'll see that 4 people have "History of Medicine." The page for that book shows the same cover as the page for yours, so the books should probably be combined. (Older books listed by searching Amazon often have initial "The" or "A" dropped.)

The same may be true in the case of other books you have.

grapeofdeath:

You might also check for authors with a similar name. I just combined Robert Hastings Dreisbach & Robert H. Dreisbach. You'll know better than I whether the books listed as
"Handbook of Poisoning" are the same book.
I whittled away a couple of hundred from my list of "unique" books by hunting for other copies and combining the works or authors.

>20 MMcM: MMcM The problem of wonky touchstones and the one of editions being uncombinable because of varying attribution are ones we've also addressed in other groups. See e.g. our message #9 in Site talk: Combining works without authors. Part of the problem seems to be variation in the cataloging sources, which we guess will have to be dealt with bookmeal. Meanwhile we don't find it any more than an irritation.

myshelves

Thank you. I went through all my unique books three months ago and combinded many that under the same author name, however I think it's about time that I went and looked through my collection again since many new books have been added to other librarys since.

marietherese msg 5: Thank you for explaining that. I have gotten rid of some of my "obscure" titles by combining with the same book where author didn't have umlaut. Sorting by least popular is a help.

I'm glad you found it helpful, abirdman. As more new users enter Library Thing every day, I periodically sort by obscure and generally end up cutting down my population of orphaned books by at least one or two.

When I catalogued St Winifred's, or the World of School today I found that it has only two copies listed. How peculiar. Not everybody, it seems, has to rush out and buy St Winifred's just because it figures in Kipling's Stalky and Co. and is an important early book in the school story genre. It's an opportunity missed - there are 71 copies on Abebooks, priced at $5 and up. Not a rare book in the least. A bit offbeat, apparently.

So far I only 3 of my 51 books are singletons (17%). I don't own many books yet and am slowly amassing.

My singletons are:

Confessions of a Wife by Mary Adams
Cames by Marie Corelli
The Murder of Delicia by Marie Corelli

The first I would suspect others of also having or at least knowing about as it is the basis for all the "Confessions of a ... wife" books. The second I sincerely doubt if others have. The third is actually a short story pulled from a collection and made into its own book.

Jess

>18 Fogies: Update at nearly a year:

We've been steady at 6800 books since last Dec 10. The difference in these figures must therefore be due to the activities of other members.

singletons: 776 = 9%
only two catalogs: 1016 = 15%

I was in Italy for a month and (of course) not doing much in the way of adding to my LT listings. When I came back I noticed that the median in my stats had risen from 18 to 20. Our books are getting less uncommon all the time.

To start with, I must admit I'm actually at only 10% of my library, so things will change in the near future.
But today, I have catalogued 1,024 books.
360 shared with more than one (35%),
88 shared with one other (8.5%)
which makes a total of 43.5% shared (448 titles on 1,024) and therefore 56.5% singletons (576 of 1,024).

Honestly I'm very surprised with these results. My explanation is that I've many older (though not really rare) books, and that only 13.5% is in English (for the time being). So the language factor may be important one way or another.

When I have made some progress on cataloguing, I will try to recalculate my statistics

misericordia started a group, Unique Library Thing Book group, and coined the tag, ultb. It simplifies checking on one's books -- easy to see if someone else has added a copy, as well as periodically go through them to see if they're really still singletons.

I collect Clarence Budington Kelland books. I find it odd that CBK, once one of the most widely read and highest paid authors in America (for 30 years) , is now all but forgotten. 60 Books published and nearly 400 short stories in major national magazines. Kelland doesn’t even appear in the top 75 authors… Odd, isn't it?

For example:
- Of the 646,217 members, only 41 have a Kelland book in their library.(Unless I'm just not reading the stats correctly, which is entirely possible!)
- Of the 37,258,656 books listed, only 55 are Kelland books?
- The most Kelland books listed by one subscriber is 12 (other than myself), and the second most if four. Then there are 39 others with one book.
Just curious what you make of it..?

I must confess, I've never heard of Mr. Kelland, and now, having read his Author Page, I recognize only a single title - because it was made into a movie (twice) - Mr. Deeds.

Which ones would you suggest as an introduction to the unfamiliar reader?

How about Carolyn Wells? She was a very popular author in the early 1900s and has 90 titles listed on LT. The most popular of those is only in 22 libraries. I, and one other member, have Ptomaine Street : a tale of Warble Petticoat a parody she wrote of Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street.

And what about Paula Grogger? The flyleaf of her novel, The Door in the Grimming has these words, "A.G. Chater, translator of the works of Sigrid Undset, says of it: 'It will be surprising if this book does not take its place among the most notable foreign works of fiction that have appeared in English in this century'" ....and "a novel which may well become a milestone in contemporary European letters."

There are about three catalogs on LT with this book, which in my opinion ranks with the novels of Undset and Tolstoy, sigh.

cbkstuff:

This is surprising at first, but when you spend some time with older best-seller lists and such, you quickly discover that what happened to Kelland is the rule, rather than the exception. Popular authors are no more likely to be the ones with staying power beyond their lifetimes, maybe even less likely.

Sometimes this is because their popularity arose from how they were closely tied in to the zeitgeist of their times. Once those times are well in the past, the books seem less relevant to current readers. Sometimes it's because tastes for styles and subject matter change. Sometimes it is less obvious why - just no one chose to reprint anything, or there was some problem with an estate that was hard to deal with, or who knows what.

Sometimes they disappear for decades and then suddenly reappear, because some champion makes the world aware. You could be the one for Kelland!

You note that "only" 55 books in LT are Kelland books, but if he wrote 60, 60 is the ceiling. Not that bad a percentage for a prolific author from a while back. Only 41 LTers having at least one is pretty telling, though.

(edited to make it clear who I was responding to)

rtttt01, good points.

Another reason, connected to your point about zeitgeist, perhaps, is that popular authors will sometimes acquire their popularity to a great extent through marketing. Once that marketing effort has waned along with an author's career, he or she may quickly drop off the public radar, unless there is a real quality to the work. I would imagine this may be more true for recent and/or current authors than for authors 70 years ago (a number I picked out of thin air, put you get what I mean, I'm sure).

rtttt01 and rocketjk,

Good thoughts, all around..

I'd like to think that interest in CBK could be regenerated.. personal interest is in the 'home town boy makes good' theme, as he was from our little town. Your point is well taken, as not many even in my town know much about him. The newly printed series books may help.
Thanks.

rocketjk:

Great point.

It's fun to think about which current authors may last 100 years or more after their deaths. Some, I think, we can fairly easily rule out. But some who do last could be people who are barely noticed today.

The critic Michael Dirda has said that he thinks these guesses are hopeless. He doesn't think we can make assumptions like the most thoughtful or literary or exciting or skilled or forward-thinking will survive. We can't know, he says, what will resonate with people of the future, and it may be something that is way off of our radar screens today. But it's still fun to talk about.

Dirda glumly notes that critics are the least likely to last, and unfortunately he can show lots of evidence for this.

Related to this recent discussion: you all may not know that there is a discussion group specifically about bestsellers from previous years -- Bestsellers over the Years. It lists the top ten sellers for every year since 1900 and how many LT copies there are of each.

johnandlisa...I will check out the Bestsellers group, thanks!
rtttt01, rocketjk;
I think, more than the books, that I'd like to see CBK recognized for his contribution to everyday life in America.. many years of contributions to American Boy, reaching developing minds as they were in the shadwo of WW1.. 30 years in Saturday Evening Post, etc., must have made some difference in the contemporary culture to keep sustaining selling magazines?.

#40 > Interesting info about Dirda, rtttt01. I have a very cool book (which I have actually read!) called Homespun America. (The touchstone goes to the wrong book, even though it shows correctly in the Touchstones column on the right when editing. Anyway, I'm talking about this book: http://www.librarything.com/work/6597749/book/26680689. I just noticed it's listed in only two libraries: mine and Carl Sandberg's. How cool is that?) It is a collection of essays, articles, excerpts and editorials, presented in chronological order from the time of the American Revolution through 1958, when it was published. All of the entries were by writers/journalists who were very well known and popular in their own times. Although we do have people like Ulysses S. Grant and Mark Twain represented, it is amazing and sobering to see how many of the writers included are totally unknown today.

I was ruminating the other day about how things have a tendency to disappear after two generations. What I mean by that is that I have knowledge of cultural things that were important to my parents, things like, off the top of my head, let's say radio stars like Edgar Bergen or shows/movies like the Bowry Boys. I heard references to these things in the programs my parents watched, perhaps, or saw old movies/tv shows that were aimed at entertaining them. But those things have disappeared from the culture now, so all that stuff that seemed obvious and timeless to me when I was a boy have essentially faded away. My children (if I had any) might know about the things that entertained me when I was younger, but would have very, very little chance of coming across the things that entertained my parents. Some things really are timeless, and will last regardless. Bogart movies, for example, and Ellington/Basie/Goodman (to use movies and music as two examples). But the lesser big bands my father might have danced to will be lost to all but the most interested jazz buff and the less famous noir films to all but dedicated old movie enthusiasts. "Who knows what evil lies in the hearts of men" may remain somehow a cultural catch phrase, but the answer, "The Shadow knows" and any knowledge of who the Shadow might have been, will most likely fade right away. Again, I only know about the Shadow because my parents did. How would my niece and nephew know the Shadow?

Anyway, it's just a theory.

>43 rocketjk:
I think you're pretty much right on target. If it weren't for audio and video recordings, a lot less would survive the third generation.

Think about how many expressions people use everyday with no clue that it came from Shakespeare, the Bible, or some 1950s commercial.

Another interesting bit about how things last - the Library of Congress completed a study on the best medium for near-permanent archiving of their extensive audio collection. Their conclusion - 78 RPM platters. Unlike in my dad's day, the medium (platter) itself can be made to last nearly forever with today's technology, and the recording can be reproduced with a very simple mechanical device and no electricity. This came up because of concerns that rapidly changing technology (LPs, cassettes, 8-tracks, CDs, DVDs, flash-drives, DVRs, whatever's next) made it difficult to ensure that older archives could be retrieved. It was my understanding that they have already begun transferring audio recordings from various media to 78s.

Print on quality paper is the 78-rpm record for the written word. If we abandon this altogether we may find that very little, if any, of what's written today will be retrievable in 100 years.

Os.

#44.. just another reason to save money to repair my old gramophone...

Osbaldistone - this is SO interesting about 78s...thanks!

So, when solar storms wipe out common technology that we think we need to live, the ol' 78s will be there.

>44 Osbaldistone:
Osbaldistone - I once heard someone say that they didn't like Shakespeare because he used too many clichés!

>47 feach:
Yeah, I'd have to admit, I wouldn't want to be the actor who has to deliver "Alas, poor Yorick..." and make it sound fresh.

Os.

LOL!

Okay, old actor's trick... start with the line everyone knows in a whisper and face upstage.

The problem is there are sports fans out there who want to hear how you deliver *that line*- much like which recording of Rigoletto do you like best?

#44 >

"Another interesting bit about how things last - the Library of Congress completed a study on the best medium for near-permanent archiving of their extensive audio collection. Their conclusion - 78 RPM platters."

That is the coolest thing I've read in many a day. And your point about quality paper echoes something I recently heard on an NPR piece. Paper and vinyl! Who knew?

>#50

"Paper and vinyl! Who knew?"

Well, except that 78 RPM records are made not of vinyl, but of shellac. They're much more brittle than vinyl.

>51 dkathman:
78 RPM records were made of shellac, but the LOC will not be using shellac for the 78s they make for 'permanent' audio archives. I'm sure they've specified some very strict requirements for the manufacture of these disks.

Os.

Shellac is hygroscopic.

The Portland vase and shellac drinking Buddist monks come to mind. It seems to preserve the monks well.

>53 ziska: Portland vase and shellac drinking Buddist monks...

Seriously?

I googled it, but couldn't find what you're talking about. Would you mind enlightening me?

Seriously...

For the monks- I haven't read the book myself but it was discussed on a painter's message board awhile back:

"there's a chapter about it in a book by Heather Pringle, "The Mummy Congress".

In the 12th-19th Centuries, Japanese Buddhist Monks practiced a form of Seticism, that involved self-mummification, part of which is done while the Monk lived and then he would (commit) suicide. The last (sp?, pronounced uu dun uh sun) Udunason Monk to practice this, was about 100 years ago and he told of eating only a diet of nuts and grains (grain and seeds in another show for three years), while eating less and less of a period of time. He drank an enamel-like liquid (then a tea from certain evergreens that was of a shellac substance for another three years), then for his last 43 days, he drank salt water (special mineral water that is lethally high in arsenic which not only poisons the person but kills the bacteria in your gut, so it won't cause the body to rot from the inside outward). At that point, he laid himself out in his grave and was covered by straw where he would allegedly die one year later (rang a bell each day at a certain time and usually about the third or fourth day the bell stopped but he was left entombed for another year), to be dug up as a mummy, three years later, and they showed his alleged mummy sitting on a wooden platform on display. "

The restoration of the Portland Vase in the British museum is another unrelated story which was a fantastic documentary film.

Shellac was the "glue" of choice in for 19th century restoration of porcelain and glass since it is reversible.

55 Hey yeah, Mummy Congress is where I read about self-mummification! I was thinking it might have been in In Search of the Immortals. Both are good books.